The first step on this trip is mental. We need to begin by no longer treating the Internet like a ghost. It's made of more metal, plastic, and fiber than you can fathom—and it's spread across the whole world, a monster machine that hugs the entire globe. So we hunted down the web's physical foundation, across land and sea, to pinpoint exactly what you'd need to take out. Hypothetically. It turns out, Anonymous' threat isn't insane—just the way they talked about doing it. You can't destroy a signal while using it; the Internet's destruction requires analog violence, not some beefed up DDoS strike.

Everyone seems to be talking about the New Aesthetic lately. Have you seen it? It might possibly have shattered records of attention credits/takes in its opening weekend. In its tumblr form, it has has been around for a a scant year or so, instigated by James Bridle. He said he had been collecting things for a while now, and described it as a “mood-board for unknown products.” Drones, mapping, surveillance infrastructure, conspicuous augmentation, pixelation, fetishising obsolescence, technological ghosts, nostalgia for the glitch, #botiliciousness, the haptic revolution, and so on. Visual as all get out. All the aesthetic seductiveness of a near future that might be already here.

The New Aesthetic concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.” That eruption was inevitable.

If aesthetics could be hacked like code, then a beautiful rose, in the beak of a beautiful flamingo, flying in a beautiful sunset, would be 3X-beautiful. It isn’t. It never will be. You can’t make it be. That’s not the way the world works.

A sincere New Aesthetic would be a valiant, comprehensive effort to truly and sincerely engage with machine-generated imagery — not as a freak-show, a metaphor or a stimulus to the imagination — but as it exists. The real deal, down to the scraped-metal chip surface, if necessary.

Artists have used mechanical means of perception for a long time now. One doesn’t have to apologize for this nowadays, in the way Baudelaire used to wring his hands over daguerreotype cameras. That fight’s over. Everybody’s got hardware. People who can’t read have hardware. Every ivory tower we possess is saturated with hardware.

This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern world when we use our perceptual habits to explain events that we can’t perceive or easily understand. Rather than accept the complexity of a situation—say, that snarl of causal interactions in the cholesterol pathway—we persist in pretending that we’re staring at a blue ball and a red ball bouncing off each other. There’s a fundamental mismatch between how the world works and how we think about the world.